Suck Goes to High-Tech India

His house, he says, is a few blocks away. This lovely new manse is in fact PortalPlayer's Indian headquarters. It's not the only Hyderabadi start-up to have a master bedroom instead of a boardroom; many of the other houses in Jubilee Hills are also being used as corporate digs. Zealous real-estate developers built the houses thinking they'd soon fill with cybermillionaires — forgetting that you don't get the rich folk before you get the start-ups. So the baby companies take whatever space is available — much of it in the form of 5-bedroom estates.

Chowdary and I chat for awhile about why Hyderabad is a vastly superior location to Bangalore, with Chowdary making more or less analagous points to those I'd heard several times down in Karnataka. Sure, Hyderabad's new hi-tech real estate developments would be artificial, with few connections to the city's indigenous culture. But that was a selling point! Clean air, open spaces, easy parking — the new Hyderabad is a place to which anyone from anywhere could comfortably move tomorrow. Bangalore is expensive, dirty and crowded — no place you'd want to have a family.

Then two of Chowdary's friends arrive — a prominent cardiologist and a now-turned-out former member of the national parliament — and we drive the 15 minutes to Hi-Tech City. They have never visited, but are thinking of getting into the real-estate development game that Chowdary knows is going to blow up fat.